Bodyguard (21 page)

Dom was in Bulgaria, so Paul and I tore down to Chatham. We were to meet outside an estate agents – only because they did most of their dodgy business from an internet café about ten shops up the road. As ever, we got there early to check out the location. I left the Mercedes round the corner – if only the license fee payer knew my attention to detail, to living the part so that there were no flaws in my story! Something like that, anyway.

We were both filming, but we knew we needed good light. Early evening in January meant that we had to over-prepare the scene. No noise from the street would help, and if I stood right next to the estate agent’s window, there would surely be a light inside doing the work for us. Just down the street was a bus shelter with a lamppost. That would provide a perfect mood shot. Paul texted Štefan the Translator to say we were here.

‘Are the girls still available?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘You don’t sound so sure.’ I was doubtful.

He confirmed they were.

‘Am I going to be doing business with Štefan or his cousin in Margate?’ I needed to know. ‘I will respect Štefan but I want to do business with the bigger boss.’

I would say any old shit to reel them in. The game of cat and mouse would continue the next Sunday at Gatwick, with Mario, the man from Margate. Štefan the Translator told me that the girls weren’t working at the moment, and that nobody was paying them. They were staying in Mario’s house.

‘This is different to what you told me. You told me they were working in a pub.’ I was furious. The trail of bullshit was beginning.

‘He’s got other girls working in the pub now.’ Štefan explained. I asked if they were for sale, too. ‘He’s just brought them up,’ Štefan fobbed me off.

‘Are they virgins – clean?’ I must have sounded like a right perv on the tape.

‘They’re not virgins but they are like …’

‘Fresh,’ I interrupted Štefan. ‘And how have they been broken in? Have they been fucked properly?’

They had.

It was essential I spoke like this playing the role. I had to make sure I wasn’t buying Hilda Ogden but equally I didn’t want some frigid totty who had only had a knee trembler behind the bike sheds. They needed to know how to treat my clients properly. How did Štefan know that they were broken in? Well, obviously he had tried the product first-hand.

Within twenty minutes or so, we were heading back out of Kent. Events here had overtaken Košice, principally because the trail had gone cold there. Here, we had a potential sting. All I needed to see were the girls – get the job done. If we had them on film, we had hit the jackpot. Editorially, how it worked was no longer my concern. I would let the grown-ups deal with that in London.

The meetings were coming thick and fast. This was good news. We were rapidly climbing the ladder of trust the Eastern European way.
At some point, this had to pay off. If they could do this business at this speed, what was the bigger picture? How many times had they done this and used these same venues to meet? The estate agents must have been a regular RV.

On 6 January, I checked into the Sofitel at the North Terminal in Gatwick. Busy man that I was, wheeling and dealing, I would fit them in ‘on the way out to Spain’. I booked a suite with connecting doors to another room, and we rigged up everywhere. My mate Alan from a specialist surveillance company came in and layered the place in hidden surveillance gear. Paul had a backup camera. I was clean. Annie Allison, the producer, was in the adjacent room with Julius and Richard Bilton.

Downstairs, the tropical garden area of the hotel was packed. Julius went down to pretend to be working on the laptop. As we greeted the Slovaks in the bar with a couple of initial drinks, he got his emails up on the screen, feigning interest in BBC bureaucracy. His laptop camera went to work. Nobody would ever know.

In the bar, I held court while Paul went to fetch Štefan the Translator, Štefan the Boss and Mario from Margate! When they arrived, I asked him what they had discussed in the car. The first answer established my character – there was to be no smoking in my vehicle. The second confirmed the hierarchy – the deal was with Mario.

I checked I was speaking slowly enough for them, urged them to finish drinks and ushered them up to the room to do business. I told them once we were done, we could have dinner, then conclude business next week after ‘my trip’. If they’d had half a brain and weren’t just looking at the pound signs, they could have checked every flight going out and wouldn’t have found any sign of Craig Summers. That’s what I would have done. I summoned the waiter and told him to whack it all on room 635. I motioned to Paul to carry the phones – he knew the drill.

‘If the wife phones …’ I began.

‘Yeah, yeah, you’re in a meeting and you’ll call her back.’ We had both become other people far too often!

‘Let’s get fucking down to business,’ I said, straight in there with Mario. ‘I need to know – are you the main man I’m dealing with now? Is that correct?’

Mario needed this translating.

‘I’ve never had Eastern European girls before. I’ve always used English girls before.’ I pretended to ask for advice. ‘I need to know the tricks of the trade if there are any. How do you control them? How do I look after them? Are there any problems with them? Do you understand that?’

Mario told me that you only needed to tell them once. ‘They do not know much English. It is enough to show them by hand where to go and what to do,’ Štefan the translator told me. He added that if I had a problem, I could bring the girls to Mario and he would sort.

‘Will there be any problems with the girls?’ I reiterated.

‘No problem. I can trust them and they can trust me,’ he reassured me. He suggested paying the girls between
£
250 to
£
350 per month but charging the punters between
£
300 and
£
500 a time, depending on what they wanted. It was clearly a well-worn strategy.

Back down in the bar, the pressure was off. I had met Mr Margate but I had two girls in the bag – one beautiful, one not so beautiful. I didn’t really give a toss. There had been no whiff of any problem. I thought I was within a whisker of getting them. We had one meeting left. Within a fortnight, we were going to collect them from Bar 26 in Margate. Just one thing stood in our way – and we had no choice about it.

If they rocked up in Margate with the girls, then we had to hand them over to the Police Welfare Unit. It was time to tell Kent Constabulary we were about to buy sex workers. I was slightly wary of sharing our intelligence, for fear they might scupper or take over the op, but in the bigger picture, the professional standards of the BBC were all that counted. Thankfully, Kent Constabulary said that they would pay the money but we would run the show. I was more than happy with that. However, I did have a very big concern. They should have seen the schoolboy error that they were making – how and why
was I introducing another person to the deal right at the final stage? That was why Sangita had got jettisoned with Harry. It was too late in the game. You simply didn’t introduce a new player so close to the deal. I wouldn’t know their undercover cop any more than the Slovaks would, and that meant there was none of that natural acting chemistry that Paul, Dom and I could carry off to a tee. If he misread me at the key moment, then we would look pretty stupid and be cursing ourselves forever.

On the Saturday before Margate, we went to meet the police to see if they had any better master plan than us. Dave Clark from the City of London police had been my initial contact on the story just before Christmas – he sent an unmarked car to fetch me from home just after half seven in the morning. I loved that – cruising round the M25, pretending to put the blues and twos on. I was itching for a go. I even asked if I could pull some muppet over just for a laugh. I could never travel on the M25 again after this – speed down the hard shoulder with your lights on – what the hell had everyone been complaining about all these years? We were genuinely running a little late. I took great pleasure in barging everything out the way on our way to meet the detective sergeant (DS) and the undercover cop (UC).

The car was one thing but imagine how much I loved running the meeting with the police. One problem. The undercover cop didn’t show – he was running multiple identities too, and was on another job. The way I saw it, we could only really work him in as the money man. I would have brought him down especially from London to deliver the loot. But you can’t work backwards from the sting with your cover story – this late introduction of the UC meant that I had denied myself the chance earlier in the piece to tell Štefan and Mario that I was too important to travel with the money. It was plausible to have someone carry my cash, but it was far from watertight. It would have got us in the shit big time if I had started messing around in Luník like this, but on home soil, given their readiness to meet plus the frequency of the meetings, it was a chance I was prepared to take.

It left me slightly uneasy; I was a control freak when it came to work. And rightly so. Someone had to have a plan and lead. I didn’t deal in uncertainties. Also, the circle of knowledge on a sting like this is tiny: you never add people, you only lose them. Štefan got that – he had binned Rudolf the Muscle for the Gatwick meeting once Mario stepped up to the plate.

I loved it though – I was told the UC guy was a good man, a true pro and I was running the show. The alternative was that I handed over everything to the police and had to watch it play out from the back of the control room. On the ground, they would go on my shout. Thankfully, Annie the producer had been firm with them – this was our sting, and they would bathe in its propaganda glory if it all came off. End of.

The meeting lasted a couple of hours. Crucially, we agreed when we would call the mission in. The cops would have a van at the end of the road. On the exchange of the money, they would storm Bar 26 in Margate and arrest everyone. It was a classic military ops meeting. The DS would run the team of twelve on the ground. Richard Bilton and Annie were down the road listening. I loved it. I would take any opportunity I could to bark orders at the cops – this was a once in a lifetime opportunity – the stuff wannabe action men like me always dreamed of.

Next stop: The Hilton, Maidstone, a few days later. 14 January. Time to go.

Kent Constabulary had taken over two business suites. We were all in plain clothes and with plenty of time to kill. It was only 11.00. I walked everybody through the story one more time. This was my first joint mission with a police force – there was a lot riding on this for the various forces and individuals concerned. Kent Constabulary had an awareness of the sex trafficking scene, but were doing little more than keeping an eye on the story. When I showed them pictures of the Štefans and Mario, it was the first time they had laid eyes on them. They had no reservations. I was sure we knew more than them
and it was in their interests to help us make them look very good indeed. While we gave them everything we had from the Kent end, they shared very little back. If they had, between us, we may have nailed that link back to Košice – they would only say that Margate, Chatham and Rochester were the UK hubs, heavily populated with Slovaks. In short, we were potentially doing them a massive favour.

Likewise, this was exactly what the BBC stood for.

I rigged up my covert gear. I had no two-way comms – they could hear me and talk to me but I couldn’t respond. I felt the unmarked van was over the top but that was just the way nowadays. They would have three guys – we assumed – to take out. Then they had to make the girls safe. I was also very specific about one thing – when they burst in, they were to nick me, too. I wanted the whole thing to look real to the last possible moment and my credibility had to be good to go again. Remember Harry? Let go within hours. Has he surfaced again? Probably, in one of his other countries. The same could happen here. They could even beat me up if they wanted. These were three players who I’m sure were linked to Košice and we still had that on the back burner. For the sake of any knock-on effects of this op or any future Paul and Dom projects in Eastern Europe, they had to cuff me. Plus, from the point of view of my personal entertainment, it was a must!

Paul had got the confirmation by text. We were still on for 19.00. Nobody in the Hilton would have any clue a major operation was going down.

Unbelievably, it was only now that I met the undercover cop. That was rubbish. But he was a pro, and clearly could run several ops at the same time. On first impressions, I liked him professionally. His handshake gave me confidence. Dave Clark in London told me he was very experienced and I trusted Dave. It did concern me that it sounded like Kent Constabulary only had one undercover guy. When I showed him the maps and photos and passed him the intelligence, I also got the message back that he could see we had done the work
– probably a lot more than Kent Constabulary. Most importantly, though, he looked the part.

We spoke for half an hour. He had no problems with his role or the plan, telling me he had played the money man before. I assured him we would blur him out of any shots if he got caught up in anything. My instructions were that he wouldn’t speak beyond the introductions and handing over the cash. Then we had our own meeting without the cops. Editorially, I had to be sure again. If the tapes ended up in court, I had to make sure again that nobody would say I had put words in anyone’s mouth or that we had manipulated the edit.

That lasted another thirty minutes, then Paul, Dom and I went for lunch – pre-op, I was starving. Dave Clark was at the bar – he told me to play the part. ‘They will arrest you and might be a bit rough with you.’ He said what I wanted to hear. ‘They know you are filming so go along with it.’

I loved it. I was dreaming of these 6ft 2 bobbies storming through the door and nicking me, and me mouthing back at them in the role. My blood was pumping and I couldn’t wait to get started. We had three more hours to kill. What do you do so close to an op? I retired to my room for a rest and to rig myself up. I blasted out some Springsteen to get me fired up. Another day, another job. The first time you go to war you think about it a bit – likewise an op like this. The second, third, fourth time you do it, you just find the zone and run the drills like a pro. It’s what I did and I wouldn’t change it for the world.